Again, there is, on the surface, nothing new about Van Helsing’s allegations; one encounters the familiar names – Von Sebottendorff and General Haushofer, Hitler’s “geopolitics” guru – in connection with familiar themes: the fascination for the Orient and for its “secret wisdom”.
But, again, Van Helsing imparts new information – again without the slightest substantiation – that is unique to him, namely, that the Vienna meeting was for a twofold purpose: (1) to acquire knowledge about some apparently (very) secret Templar texts, and (2) to acquire knowledge about an even more secret fraternity, the Lords of the Black Stone. And of course, lest it be forgotten, the words Black Stone, in German, are schwarzen Stein, abbreviated as
“SS”. It is not long, therefore, before Van Helsing couples this new twist to another ancient occult doctrine, the “Black Sun” (schwarze Sonne) of illumination, also abbreviated “SS.”117
Then in September of 1917, Baron Von Sebottendorff allegedly met with leaders and members of this mysterious “Lords of the Black Stone” fraternity in “Untersberg to receive the power of the ‘Black-Purple Stone’ after which the secret society was named.”118 Again, no substantiation or evidence of this assertion is offered. However, perhaps a very indirect corroboration exists in the form of the famous traveler-explorer-occultist Nicholas Roerich, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roerich, of course, had a similar preoccupation with “magic stones”, namely, the celebrated chintimanti stone of Mongolia.
In any case, whatever happened in September 1917 appeared to have been successful, for in 1918 a group formed around Von Sebottendorff in Bad Aibling, which would become the notorious Thule Society. It is here that “scientific magic, astrology, occultism and Templar knowledge as well as ‘Golden Dawn’ practices like Tantra, Yoga and Eastern meditation” were all combined.”119 And among this potent mix was also a tincture of messianism, for the Thule Gesellschaft also “believed, following the Revelation of Isis, in a Coming Saviour (German: Heiland = the Holy One), the ‘Third Sargon’ who would bring to Germany glory and a new Aryan culture.”120 In other words, the program was a total one: the goal of the secret society not only continued to be to (re-)discover and (re-)construct a lost and exotic technology of hegemony, but it also sought to place its ideas and agendas into power. Once in power, it would maintain itself in authority by the very technological means it was seeking to (re-) discover. Thus, by implication Van Helsing is saying that one of the hidden or “occulted” agendas of the Nazi Party since its inception was always technological and occult in nature; it was committed to the (re-) discovery of a lost and buried technology of hegemony, in short, to the creation of exotic and massively destructive weapons. It was, so to speak, the one political party in the world with an occult-weapons agenda that could be called “Atlantean.” It was the one political party in the world with both feet planted firmly in Atlantis.
To drive home this point, Van Helsing cites the famous work of Dietrich Bronder, Befor Hitler Kamm (Before Hitler Came), which lists the following people as members of the Thule Gesellschaft:
1. Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Grand Master
2. Guido Von List, Master
3. Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels, Master
4. Adolf Hitler, later Reichschancellor, and “SS Superior”
5. Rudolf Hess, later Deputy Führer and SS Obergruppenführer
6. Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall and SS Obergruppenführer
7. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS and Reichsminister
8. Alfred Rosenberg, Reichsminister and NSDAP Reichsleiter
9. Hans Franck, NSDAP Reichsleiter and later Governor General of occupied Poland
10. Juilius Streicher, SA Obergruppenführer
11. Major General Prof Dr. Karl Haushofer, occultist and geopolitician, considered to be the architect of Hitler’s Lebensraum doctrine
12. Prof Dr Gottfried Feder
13. Dietrich Eckart, poet, occultist, and Editor in Chief of the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper
14. Bernhard Stempfle, confidant of Hitler
15. Dr. Theo Morell, Hitler’s personal physician
16. Franz Gurtner, Munich police president
17. Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophic society
18. Prof Dr W.O. Schumann of the Munich Technical University
19. Trebisch-Lincoln, occultist and Tibetan traveler
20. Countess Westrap.121
This list is illuminating in a number of respects.
First, it provides a general context from which to view the possible occult influences at work behind the Nazi Antarctic expedition in 1938-1939, for that expedition was under the patronage of Reichsmarschall Göring. Second, it provides a similar context from which to view the allegations of some that Hess was privy to whatever secrets that expedition found, and that these were the ultimate motivation for the Allied Powers keeping him – or his imposter – imprisoned for so long after the war. Finally, it provides an interesting context from which to view the Third Reich and its secret weapons black projects themselves, projects which included a heavy admixture of occult doctrine and experimentation. From a glance at the list, it is apparent that the SS itself is the visible extension of the Thule Gesellschaft into the Third Reich. Or, to put it differently, via the National Socialist Party, an occult secret society had seized the reigns of authority in one of the world’s great powers, and could thus direct the entire energies of that state into the overt and covert pursuit of its agendas.
Among the doctrines held by the Thule Gesellschaft that lay behind the Nazi ideology were an “Ayro-Germanic construction of religion…by the philosopher Guido Von List… a leaning towards the anti-Old Testament” views of an early Christian heresy known as Marcionism.122 This was augmented by the “esoteric history” of the Aryans believed by the Thule Gesellschaft, a history reconstructed from ancient German and Scandinavian myths. Chief among these was the belief in “Hyperborea,” the continent populated by the “ancient Aryans,” with its capital city of “Ultima Thule,” both of which were located in “the highest north”. Moreover, these “ancient Aryans” were space travelers from a planet in the star system of Aldebaran, the main star in the constellation of Taurus.123
According to this myth, the continent sank during the last ice age, whereupon, with customary Teutonic preparation, the ancient Ayrans were supposed to have burrowed into the earth and “settled under the Himalaya region” in huge subterranean cities bored out with huge machines.124 This in turn forms the rationale for the “two large expeditions” that were “sent by the SS to the Himalayas to find those entrances. Further expeditions searched in the Andes, the Matto Grosso mountains in the North and the Santa Catarina mountains in the South of Brazil, in Czechoslovakia and parts of England.”125
As Van Helsing also mentions, Hitler’s geopolitician, General Karl Haushofer, had his own personal dualistic twist to this doctrine, claiming that
Thule was actually Atlantis and – contrary to all other researchers of Tibet and India – he said that the surviving Thule-Atlanteans were separated into two groups, a good one and an evil one. Those who called themselves after their oracle Agharti – were the good and settled in the Himalaya region, the evil ones were the Shamballah – who wanted to subjugate humanity and they went West. He maintained that the fight between the people of Agharta and Shamballah had been going on for thousands of years and that in the Third Reich, the Thule Gesellschaft as Agartha’s representative – continued it against the representatives of Shamballah, the Freemasons and the Zionists. This perhaps was his mission.126
Haushofer allegedly then went on to found in 1919 “a second order, the ‘Brüder des Lichts’ (sic)(Brothers of the Light),” the society that later became the Vril Gesellschaft.127 According to Van Helsing this new secret society united the society known as Die Herren vom Schwarzen Stein (The Lords of the Black Stone), which allegedly emerged from the old Teutonic Order, and the Schwarze Ritter (Black Knights) of the T
hule Society and the SS elite of the Schwarze Sonne, or Black Sun.128
The occasion of this founding was apparently a meeting in which members of these various secret orders met in a rented forester’s lodge near what would later become Hitler’s lair, in Berchtesgaden. The meeting was also attended by two mediums, who had “mediumistically received transmissions in a secret Templar script – a language unknown to her – with the technical data for the construction of a flying machine. According to Vril documents these telepathic messages came from the solar system Aldebaran which is sixty-eight light-years away in the constellation Taurus.”129
As part of this message, the mediums were “informed” that the non-white races were in “lower (stages) of spiritual development,” and that “the more the races intermixed, the lower the spiritual development of these people sank.”130 They were also “told” that the “divine” people of “Aldebaran” had colonized “the planet Mallona (also called Maldek, Marduk or – by the Russians – Phaeton) which existed in the area of today’s asteroid belt, then between Mars and Jupiter.”131 Of course, the idea of the asteroid belt having been a former planet that had exploded is an old hypothesis, first entertained in the early nineteenth century by astronomers after the discovery of the second asteroid, and as they sought to explain why Bode’s Law predicted a planet should be in the orbit of the asteroid belt.132
What is crucial to notice, however, is that Van Helsing’s allegation makes it clear that someone inside of Germany had connected the astronomical theory of an exploded planet to certain ancient Sumerian myths, most likely that of the Enuma Elish, an ancient war epic that describes the destruction of the now missing planet by means of an ancient weapon of mass destruction.133
But Van Helsing does not stop there, for he also connects these occult practices, secret societies, astronomical theories, with the secret development of a new science and new technology:
We cannot know whether these statements about Aldebaran were based on facts, but the construction plans and the technical details that the Vril telepaths received – wherever they came from – were so accurate that they led to the most fantastic idea men ever begot: the construction of a Jenseitsflugmaschine, a “flying machine for the other side.”134
Let us pause to consider exactly what these statements mean.
First, Van Helsing supplies considerably more detail in what is otherwise the old story that the Vril Society receives UFO plans from mediums, namely, he supplies the secret societies that came together, and names the mediums involved,135 the time,136 and the place, a forester’s lodge near Berchtesgaden! But secondly, as the remarks immediately above make clear, his interest is not so much these allegations, but rather that they led to the development of an entirely different technology and science by a secret society founded for the purpose by the very man later to be Hitler’s geopolitician!
As if that were not enough, Van Helsing then goes on to make the following statement:
During this early phase of “alternative science” Dr. W. O. Schumann of the Technical University in Munich, both a Thule and a Vril member, held a speech a section of which is reproduced here:
“In everything we recognize two principles that determine the events: light and darkness, good and evil, creation and destruction – as in electricity we know plus and minus. It is always: either – or…..The coming new age will be an age of a new, positive, divine technology!”137
Van Helsing then notes that these remarks – one of the few that he “substantiates” - are drawn from “the German SS secret archives.”138
According to Van Helsing, the first “saucer” was secretly built by the Vril Society in 1922.139 He follows this up with even more specific information. For example, he alleges that this machine was tested for two years before it was “dismantled and probably stored in the Augsburg works of Messerschmitt.”140 Moreover, there were entries in the financial records of German aviation companies “under the codename ‘JFM’ (for Jenseitsflugmaschine)” that showed “payments towards financing this work.” 141
But it is when Van Helsing arrives at World War Two and the continuation of these projects under the Nazis that his fantasia knows no bounds. For example, he alleges that “at the beginning of 1943 it was planned to build in the Zeppelin works a cigar-shaped mother ship,” a machine called the “Andromeda Device”, with a length of around 150 yards, capable of storing “several saucer-shaped craft in its body for flights of long duration,”142 or perhaps better stated, flights of Adamski-esque imagination.
But immediately after these sensational and highly questionable allegations, Van Helsing again comes up with more unsubstantiated specifics:
By Christmas 1943 an important meeting of the Vril Gesellschaft took place at the seaside port of Kolberg. The two mediums Maria Orsic and Sigrun attended. The main item on the agenda was the Aldebaran Project. The mediums had received precise information about habitable planets around the sun Aldebaran and one began to plan a trip there. At a January 22, 1944 meeting between Hitler, Himmler, Kunkel (of the Vril Society) and Dr. Schumann this project was discussed. It was planned to send the Vril 7 large-capacity craft through a dimension channel independent of the speed of light to Aldebaran. According Ratthofer a first test flight in the dimension channel took place in the winter of 1944. It barely missed disaster…143
In addition to all this, Van Helsing also states that these exotic craft “should create an extremely strong field around itself extending somewhat into its surroundings which would render the space thus enclosed including the machine a microcosm absolutely independent of the earthbound space.”144
All of this exotic research was conducted under the Nazis, according to Van Helsing, by a group “within the SS” that was “studying alternative energy, the SS-E-IV,” or SS Entwicklungstelle IV (SS Development Group IV). Here Van Helsing is on more solid ground, for there was indeed such a group in the SS, whose top secret brief was precisely to research “alternative energy.” But Van Helsing adds his customary occult twist, for he calls this group “Development Group IV of the Black Sun,” or Schwarze Sonne, abbreviated “SS”. The doctrine of the Black Sun (Schwarze Sonne) or Black Stone (Schwarze Stein) was the secret doctrine of the SS known only to Himmler’s highest SS generals.145 The purpose of this group was “to render Germany independent of foreign oil.”146
What emerges from all this is that there were two space programs already in existence in Nazi Germany, a “public” space program, that was in fact the “secret” rocket program of Von Braun and the Peenemünde scientists, and a much more secret, and much earlier, one, that begun by the secret societies and later continued by the SS, a program with a completely different physics and technology.
While most of Van Helsing’s fantasia inevitably strikes one as absurd, certain aspects of it fit the broad outlines one has come to expect with Nazi secret weapons development: an undercurrent of occult inspiration, development in utter secrecy, the search for a new physics and new technology, the evident reliance upon and knowledge of ancient myths in the reconstruction of that science and technology, and the fusion of these with other occult doctrines – “root races”, extraterrestrial human origins, and so on – and a genocidal political agenda.
If, as Van Helsing suggests, this dual track program was in fact begun by pre-war secret societies, then one method of testing his allegations might be to see if there is any indication that after the war the same or similar groups continued the lines of exotic and esoteric research the SS was pursuing during the war.
In any case, Van Helsing’s is not the last word in the Two Space Programs Hypothesis. Indeed, if David S. Percy and Mary Bennett are correct, then not only were the Two Space Programs that were begun by the Nazis during the war continued after the war both by the Soviet Union and the United States, they moreover exhibited much more coordination between them than the space programs of alleged rivals should really exhibit, especially at the height of the Cold War where the ultimate prize –
the Moon – promised rich benefits in prestige and military position to whomever got there first.
6. The Dark Moon Version
British authors David S. Percy and Mary Bennett are the latest in a long line of researchers who question the historical record of the Apollo manned Moon missions. This is not to say that they are of the typical “Apollo-was-entirely-hoaxed” genre. Quite the contrary. As they put their own case, the purpose of their book, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistleblowers, is “to question the entire validity of the official record of mankind’s exploration of the Moon especially the Apollo lunar landings. We are not however claiming that astronauts from Earth have never walked on the Moon.”147 That is to say, they believe mankind went to the Moon, but that it did not happen in the way we have been told it happened.
Like many researchers who question the official explanation of the Apollo program and its celebrated Moon landings, Bennett and Percy offer a compelling case that many of the Moon photographs allegedly taken by the astronauts while on the Moon were in fact photographs that were taken on a set. Like many others, they cite the usual discrepancies in lighting, varying angles of shadows within single frames, light sources from areas supposedly in shadow, and so on. Unlike many others, they do not cite these anomalies as proof that we never went, but only to raise questions about the official version of the way we went. And the Two Space Programs Hypothesis is crucial to their reconstruction of what they believe actually happened.
On their view, the Two Space Program Hypothesis takes on the following outline:
SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology Page 13
